“You cannot control your own population by force;
but it can be distracted by consumption.”
– Noam Chomsky

Despite decades of government programs intended to encourage having children, Japan has now experienced nine consecutive years of population decline. And current trends don’t seem to be pointing in the right direction. August 2025 numbers released by Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs showed the country’s total population for 2024 as 122,631,432, a 1.51% decline in a single year! Moreover, the birthrate had dropped by another 5% last year, to its lowest ever. And next year will bring a Fire Horse!

As an overpopulated island country, bearing children has always been a balancing act for the Japanese. For most of the country’s recorded history, a third child could earn an entire family the status of a community burden. The Edo-era (1600-1868) euphemism, “mabiki” (間引き), meaning “thinning”, was an eastern Japanese reference to infanticide. In some parts of the country, it was a common enough practice to actually reduce local populations. It wasn’t until Japan opened to outside resources in the mid-1800s that a typical family might have four or more children.

“Replacement-level fertility” refers to the total number of children per female needed to keep a population size stable over time, without migration. It’s generally considered to be around 2.1 for most countries, although it can vary according to factors such as child mortality rates, average lifespans, or an overall population age distribution. After WWII, the fertility-rate in Japan was sufficient to keep its population growing through the 1960s. Oddly, however, very few children were born in 1966.

This was due to 1966 being a “Year of the Fire Horse”. An Edo-era story from puppet theater and popular books alleged that women born in such a year in the sixty-year cycle of twelve zodiac animals and five traditional elements of wood, earth, metal, water and fire were hot-tempered, and that they would rather gruesomely kill their own husbands. These years are consequently seen as an inauspicious time in which to risk bearing a potentially murderous female child.

So few children were born in 1966 that eighteen years later, Japanese college entrance acceptance rates surged by over 50% due to the lack of competition. The number of births bounced back in 1967. But then overall fertility-rates began to drop fairly steadily after 1970. And since 1975, the year my family left Japan, they have remained below replacement-levels.

With the exception of some mid-80s economic bubble years, the fertility-rate trend stayed downward until 2006, when government incentives combined with a strong Yen to encourage bigger families. But within a decade, birthrates had again started to drop. And since the pandemic years, the decline has been precipitous. In 2024, the country’s total fertility-rate fell to just 1.15.

Japanese women are simply choosing not to have children for a variety of reasons. Some are economic, such as cost-of-living, missing work or high childcare costs. Work pressures, such as long hours and a stigma associated with working mothers also discourage women who work from having children. And the Japanese social reality is that as populations have increasingly shifted from close-knit countryside communities into the fast-paced blaze of city life, the social foundations once provided by family have been replaced by conspicuous consumption. 

Concurrent to its low number of yearly births, Japan is now also experiencing a “mass-mortality” phenomenon due to the high average age of its population… which could be “good” or “bad” depending upon one’s perspective. But the net effect is to also elevate replacement-level fertility numbers as the country’s overall population plunges. If one walks around some of the central neighborhoods in Tokyo, this phenomenon has become visible as shuttered local businesses and abandoned homes… or homes that merely appear abandoned because the people who live in them are simply too old to care for the properties anymore.

Japan’s new Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, has called this population decline the country’s “greatest problem”. As a response, she instituted the creation of a new government department known as the “Population Strategy Headquarters”. Its primary purpose will apparently be to establish local family social services, and to improve rural living conditions in ways that would attract a younger population. But in an interesting rhetorical reference to immigration, it will also develop ways to “promote coexistence with foreign talent.”

Immigration is, however, a currently somewhat controversial topic. Japanese society places enormous emphasis on community harmony, social order, and collective responsibility. The social structures, expectations and relationship-building aspects of Japanese culture extend from the workplace into general societal norms. And these social expectations define much of what it means to be “Japanese”.

This is why Japan has a reputation as one of the world’s safest and most efficient countries. It’s a cooperative mono-culture, where mutual trust provides the social currency necessary to maintain a high standard-of-living. When a society doesn’t have to expend resources repairing vandalism, insuring theft, policing crime, or housing criminals, then those resources can be applied to infrastructural benefits such as healthcare, transportation, human-services or disaster-relief. But it also means that Japanese culture has little ability to tolerate disorder.

Foreigners only account for about 3% of Japan’s total population. Contrast this with the high standard-of-living and tiger-economy of Singapore, where 13% of its citizens are permanent-resident immigrants, and a whopping 29% of the population is temporary-immigrant labor. Immigrants in Japan, however, are mainly associated with a disproportionate number of crimes. The majority of those crimes involve immigration violations, such as overstaying visas or working without proper authorization, which aren’t threats to public safety. Unfortunately, however, Japanese immigrants have also become associated with more serious crimes.

Official data shows the number of arrests of foreigners for major crimes, such as murder and robbery, have indeed increased over the past decade. And per-capita crime rates are overall significantly higher among foreigners when compared to native Japanese. But much of this represents a broad interpretation of what are in actuality localized phenomena. A recent example is with regard to a Turkish refugee population in Kawaguchi City in Saitama Prefecture, which has a per-capita violent-crime rate that’s over fifteen times that of the native Japanese population. In response, Economic Security Minister, Kimi Onoda, has suggested that it’s time to start deporting those immigrants who don’t want to coexist with Japanese society. 

Unfortunately, Japanese media often generalizes coverage of such incidents, which contributes to overall negative perceptions of immigrants. This has resulted in a current proposal to offset the monetary costs of immigrant crime by raising foreign residency fees from an equivalent of a few tens-of-dollars per year to as much as $400 next year, and later to perhaps as much as $1,000. Regardless, when crime statistics are interpreted according to individual immigrant groups, most actually show serious crime rates fairly consistent with the native Japanese population… or lower. In fact, many immigrants do assimilate and even go on to raise families in Japan. 

How Japan can address its collapsing population while maintaining its cultural identity in the process raises difficult questions. Such a regimented society makes for an admirable harmony; but it can also be stifling. For a new generation of Japanese families, the nation will also need to sell its young population on a future that promises more than the mere distraction of consumerism. And if the solution is to arrive as immigrants, then the native Japanese population may need to accept the loss of some parts of its culture. Regardless, Japan’s rapidly declining population portends a social and economic conflagration that the country will be forced to extinguish.